


Infinity

by theheadandthekin



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-30 13:20:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10163870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theheadandthekin/pseuds/theheadandthekin
Summary: She is becoming.(Post-S3; originally posted to Tumblr. Fair warning: Abbie is taken by Pandora's Box, but to a different fate than that gross bullshit in the TV version.)





	

She is _becoming.  
_

She tells him they are eternal souls because it’s a lie, a comfort. She can’t tell him what they truly are, what _she_ truly is now, because he’ll only ask questions.

Questions and questions and questions.

And if she answers those questions, he’ll want to join her. More than she knows he _already_ does. Then she’ll have to tell him why he can’t. Because he could–it is _possible;_ she could pull him into the tempest with her–but he’s not ready.

He’s far too dangerous, far too volatile. _Still._

For the sake of everything, for the sake of the humanity of them _both,_ he can’t follow her.

They would damned well earn their title, “Destroyers,” 

Anyway, there’s no time for it, at least like this; she’s already bursting apart into millions, billions, of pieces, a ball of lightning and energy.

It hurts, though, to mislead him, and the ache only hastens the dissolution of those tiny shreds of her self. For now, a goodbye like this is better than the truth.

Better for both of them. Better for everyone. Better for all of creation.

She isn’t dying or disappearing. She is _becoming._

* * *

By the time she sits beside him on her porch, she is already far larger than her body. It’s happening so fast, she can sense, and feel, and _taste_ the electrical impulses in his brain.

She can decode them, can see their beautiful, buzzing architecture.

She forgets what to say, exactly. Forgets that _he’s_ trapped within the flesh and bone and mind of his mortal self.

It’s hard to explain what’s happening amidst what she’s _feeling._  

It’s hard to explain what’s happening while she’s _lying._

“Our job was to carry you forward,” she says, trying to emphasize his own _becoming_. “My job is done.”

His reaction is swift and visceral; the “no” that falls from his lips is a recoiling scream in his mind, an expression of complete, unmediated repulsion.

The pain she shares with him is almost too much, so she interferes. Tests it. _  
_

_Stop being a selfish ass, Crane. Your job was to carry me forward, too. To this._

She slides along his neural circuits, runs along the bright pathways of his cerebral cortex, and, in a moment of strange, glorious quantum possibility, blinks into every molecule in every one of his cells and all the spaces between them.

_Think about it._

She can sense him sensing her. _  
_

_Dammit. Think about it._

He keeps resisting.

_Don’t think, then. Feel. Because you’ve felt it. Before.  
_

It’s getting hard to hold everything together, and she wants to keep exploding outward, to let go of even the image of her physical self. It’s inevitable, but she _wants_ it now. 

She doesn’t let herself. Not yet.

They’re saying things to one another, mouths and lips and tongues forming words, she’s handing him a drink, and rising and holding out her fist he instead grasps to kiss. But it’s noise and hollow performance. 

A script of goodbyes. So small, so human.

She dances across, around, between his nerve fibers. Shows him a hundred-fold what it’s like to feel his lips against her skin. Roots in, finding places to hold on inside of him.

He tries to meet her, tries to rush after the energy of her new existence.

He can’t, though.

_Just hold me._

And she immediately feels him settle and wrap the tiny, impossible pieces of her in. She can’t hold together anymore, though, the euphoria of expansion–of light, of conquest, of _more–_ is too much.

He’ll look up and see she’s gone. She has to assure him.

(And, perhaps, assure herself.)

_I’m not leaving you._

* * *

He doesn’t tell anyone–not Jenny, not Ezra–that he can speak to her. 

Not speak to her, exactly. But communicate with her. _Feel_ her. 

It’s a bit like the connection he felt to her when Pandora cut his tether in the Catacombs, when he floated without form in the void. Dissolved. He had a sense of self, certainly, but where he dwelt, where he maintained an idea of himself, was in the unseen movement of electrons across the neurons in her brain.

And it’s a bit like the connection he felt to her when he first testing the Emblem of Thura and the tablets. Overlapping consciousnesses. 

Far more than a bond. A _oneness._

 _You gotta get through this. We’re gonna be okay._ He doesn’t hear her. He just knows. That’s her thought. Not his own. _  
_

He doesn’t tell Ezra that he knows the “new Witness” story the man shares is a bucket of steaming horseshit. 

He may not know what the truth _is_ , but he knows what it is not. He puts on a good performance, though, and it takes no effort to tell the FBI he knows nothing of a new Witness.

Jenny’s has sharp, unvoiced suspicions, but he doesn’t confirm them. He knows she thinks he might perhaps need to see someone about it, knows she wonders why his grief is so muted.

It’s because Abbie is _something_ , but she isn’t dead.

And certainly not gone.

* * *

In the middle of the highway, the Horseman bursts into flaming sparks, then _nothingness._

Jenny comes thrashing out of the bushes. “What did you _do_?”

“Nothing.” He continues to stare at the empty road, into the grey dusk.

“Wait, you didn’t even fire the crossbow, did you? How the _hell_ –”

“Miss Jenny …”

Then her eyes go wide, and she draws in a sharp breath. “My _sister._ Abbie …”

He nods. “She’s not dead. She’s something else.”

* * *

As she has become, there is no such thing as time, so how long it takes her to rebuild a corporeal self might be anywhere between the birth and death of the universe, or an “I love you” whispered in the dark.

But she does it.

It’s a hard task; to build a true, human body, she has to weave all of the pieces of herself back together, into bones, and blood vessels, nerve fibers, lungs, a heart, eggs with the micro-structures of chromosomes inside and ovaries and hemoglobin and T-cells, hormones in elegant balance, brain, the hairs on her head.

Harder, still, to keep it a secret from him.

But feeling the birth of the universe in the elemental particles of her being make the idea of, the thirst _for,_ a real surprise undeniable.

A surprise for him, certainly, but also for her.

She can _be_ and _become,_ and know so very many things, and although she knows herself–and him–from the inside out, the human heart is unpredictable.

It’s funny, the things that most frustrated her most _before_ are the source of so much pleasure _now_.

She is, for all her power, unable to resist the delight of anticipation, the unique, organic sensation of a pounding pulse.

* * *

“Abbie,” he breathes, nearly stricken, when he finds her sitting on his ratty sofa one chilly October morning.

She scans him, frozen as he is, sliding her palm back and forth along the rough cushion. “Have you ever wondered why you didn’t die, Crane, for 200 _years_?”

He can still feel her thrumming through his marrow, dancing around his brain, although it’s more like sparks now, rather than a current.

“Well.” She stands and moves toward him, hand outstretched. “You couldn’t. You _can’t._ ”

He takes her hand, and she closes her eyes. He feels her sigh–inside and out. _Touch_. _She must be touch starved._ “Abbie … what are you?”

She smiles, and brings his knuckles to her lips. 

“Me.”

“ _Abbie …”  
_

She draws him closer and, with a tug on his coat, betrays just a shade of impatience. “You know what I am. I’ve felt the primordial beat of the universe, Crane. But nothing– _nothing_ –compares to the things I’ve felt with you. From you. _For_ you.”

He reaches up to touch the perfect, precise kinks of her hair.

“You didn’t have to rebuild a body, did you?”

“Nope.” She smiles. “But I wanted to.”

He doesn’t ask how, or how long, or what will happen if he has to do the same thing. He trusts her to guide him. She’s always been better at all of it.

 _I heard that._

She punctuates it with the quantum trick she first tried when the Box exploded, pulsing into every atom of every cell of his body at once.

_Seriously, Crane? You need a guide for this, too? You know the existential stuff can wait._

“We’ve got a long, _long_ time to figure it out,” she adds with a half-smile.

“Indeed.” He _knows._ He does. He also knows she wants to kick his inquisitiveness about cosmic matters in the pants. So he lifts a brow in only mock curiosity. “Tell me, then, how does one woo a goddess?”

“Flirting! Lucky for you, she’s already wooed.”

He takes the prompting, tilting her face up toward his.

“Oh. _Lieutenant_.”


End file.
